Dangan Ronpa 1 Review after 3 years.

I didn’t like it. It shows a lot of promises in how it subverts some of the tropes in the beginning but then ended up with cliche tirade after tirade about hope, friendship and despair that you see in every other generic anime. It tries to grey it out by having characters with individual selfish desires but it not that in depth or well written. All of that ended with generic idealistic shonen stuff in the end anyway because bond, hope and friendships conquer all, man.

The beginning builds up my expectation of it being something subversive but it ended up playing some of the anime tropes too straight near the end. Felt that the mystery doesn’t pay off too, expected it to be more clever but it ended up very shallow. Basically it boils down to hey, it’s actually all random terrorist shit and I think we forgot to add any foreshadowing.

The characters are over the top and I expected them to be flamboyantly unique and charming like those in Phoenix Wright and Ghost Trick but they ended up being generic anime characters with generic lines about idealistic anime bullshit. Main character is the worst offender of this. I waited so long for his special reason to exist among these super elite and the end result is the most hamfisted generic anime writing 101 stuff. MY ULTIMATE HOPE CAN BEAT YOUR ULTIMATE DESPAIR BECAUSE ANIME!

I want to like it because it showed moments of brilliance and I enjoyed parts of it but it all falters in the end. I am more disappointed than thinking it’s a bad game to be honest. I also played it on psp way before the localized Vita version was even announced so all the expectations are build while I played the game, not before it. I haven’t play the second game yet but now that I know what to expect, I don’t think I would be that disappointed.